Blinded By Righteousness

ANTHONY LEWIS THE NEW YORK TIMES

February 10, 1999|ANTHONY LEWIS THE NEW YORK TIMES

Rep. Lindsey Graham's voice trembled as he ended the Republican prosecutors' presentation of evidence. "For God's sake," he told the Senate, "figure out what kind of person we have here in the White House."

Why the trembling emotion? Frustration, I think. Graham and the other Republican managers are true believers. They believe that an evil president is about to be acquitted of the impeachment charges, and they cannot understand why.

If they could only see it, one reason is their very certainty: their absolute conviction that they are right. Most Americans do not want to be governed by men who know they are always right. We believe that life has to have room in it for uncertainty, for change, for mercy.

Americans are wise to be uncomfortable with absolutism. Sir Isaiah Berlin, the great British historian-philosopher, showed us that certainty about everything has been the hallmark of totalitarian movements.

The Republican managers did not understand how their zealotry troubled their audience. As Philip Stephens of The Financial Times put it, they were "blinded by their moral righteousness."

An uninformed person who wandered into the Senate gallery and heard the managers excoriating President Clinton might have thought they were prosecuting him for mass murder. That is how far their heightened rhetoric was from the reality here: that the president tried to conceal illicit sex.

The Republicans made the same mistake that they and Kenneth Starr did in videotaping Clinton's Aug. 17 grand jury testimony and playing it to the country. They thought Americans would be outraged at the president's sexual misbehavior. Instead they were offended at the prurient, invasive effort to make a legal mountain out of his folly. People could imagine themselves in the hands of relentless partisan prosecutors.

There was a moment in Monica Lewinsky's deposition, not much noticed, that showed how out of touch the Republican managers were with reality. Rep. Ed Bryant asked her why she wanted to avoid testifying in the Paula Jones case about her relationship with the president. Her answer, devastating in its obviousness, was:

"First of all, I thought it was nobody's business. Second of all, I didn't want anything to do with Paula Jones or her case."

The managers dripped with sympathy for Ms. Lewinsky. The president "threw her life on the ash heap," Rep. James Rogan said. Yes, if Clinton had had the sense to turn away when she first flirted with him, he would have done himself and her a great favor. But it was Starr and the House Republicans who made her life into a public spectacle.

Henry Hyde repeatedly sneered that the Democrats had called "professors" to testify, a piece of anti-intellectual demagoguery worthy of George Wallace. He never mentioned the five career prosecutors, Democratic and Republican, who said they would never have prosecuted such a case.

That goes to the heart of the Republican failure here. The extremists on the House Judiciary Committee insisted that the president had committed crimes, and that removal from office must follow. They would not even allow the House to consider the penalty that would have fit the character of the offense, a censure motion.

The charges of perjury and obstruction of justice are supported by nothing but surmise and conjecture. As White House counsel Charles Ruff said, neither charge would survive a motion to dismiss in any court. But the managers kept saying that they were just doing their constitutional duty -- as if the Constitution required them to press a partisan case for impeachment on flimsy grounds.

If the Republican Party wants to win national elections, it is going to have to do something about the party elements, in and out of Congress, that took the country into this endless impeachment process. As the Duke of Wellington said when he looked at some of his own forces, "I don't know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but by God they terrify me."

Write to columnist Anthony Lewis at the New York Times, 229 W. 43rd St., New York, NY 10036.